And behind door #1 we have…

I love our little kitchen. It’s well laid out, and open to the family room – always a perk for me. We have two base corner cabinets with Lazy Susans, two upper corner cabinets and a narrow pantry just over 2 feet deep. It boasts a good bit of storage space, but I was a little bewildered as to how to store canned goods and still be able to find them when I needed them. Since we all cook around here, whatever storage I chose had to be logical, functional and simple for everyone to keep the chaos to a minimum.

One of the other perks of our home just down the hall from the kitchen is the laundry room. You truly haven’t experienced hot until trying to keep laundry going on an August afternoon in South Florida – in the garage. Our laundry room isn’t big, it’s more of a pass through from the garage to the downstairs hallway. There’s room for a small coat closet, washer, dryer, and a sliver of space just big enough to store the broom and mop.

Back to the kitchen, the Lazy Susans were the most logical place to store canned goods. The upper cabinets were perfect for dishes and baking supplies, the base cabinets were filled with pans and gadgets and the pantry had big black hole potential written all over it. The problem? Hard plastic Lazy Susans and no money to replace them with the sturdier wood version. I was giving them about 7 months before we would have to replace them if we stored heavy canned goods on them.

So I borrowed an idea from my resourceful sister-in-law and had my hubby build a narrow canned goods shelf unit for the wall behind the laundry room door. It’s out of the way without being too far from the kitchen, and a great use of otherwise wasted space.

lots of canned good storage behind the door

We used some 2 x 4 wood for the frame and 1 x 4 pieces for the actual shelves. He notched out some grooves for the shelves to rest in the 2 x 4 sides and screwed them in from the outside of the frame. After attaching the shelves to the sides, he added the top and bottom 2 x 4 pieces, running the entire width of the unit. He did have to cut away a small section of the side at the bottom to allow for the baseboard.

top, shelf and base details

There are a total of 6 shelves, plus the base and top to store canned and dry goods. The spacing of the shelves was a matter of laying out the cans and bottles I would usually be storing and we made the shelves that height. I sanded off the rough edges and painted it with a white semi-gloss to match our trim and make clean up a little easier. The last step was to secure it to studs in the wall using “L brackets” on several of the shelves. The last thing we wanted to do was load up our new shelf with canned goods only to have it fall on someone coming through the garage with arms full of backpacks or bags from the day.

It’s what’s behind door #1

It’s a simple little fix that allows all of us to easily see what we have or need for cooking. It’s out of the way but nearby, easy to see and it frees up space for those items we use several times each day to occupy the more prime real estate in the kitchen.

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